This seems a subject that hasn't been discussed on these boards, so I thought it might be interesting to start a thread. What are anyone's thoughts on various periodicals on music both in the UK (Classical Music, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, The Musical Times, TEMPO, or some of the academic ones such as Music and Letters, The Musical Quarterly, twentieth-century music) and abroad (US, France, Germany, wherever)? What would anyone's ideal periodical be like?

I have bought the BBC MM from our local Tesco for years, 7 or 8 issues a year, I'm sure it must be worth me getting a subscription with the discount they are offering. There's a free Brahms CD set going at this moment to new subscribers too. The articles and CD reviews are written at my level (no musical education but a 'serious' listener for 30 years, classical and jazz) I get to know about most of the top artistes, and the free CD is usually interesting, complete works of course. ClassicFM mag is awful by comparison.

I only realised yesterday that the free disc with the BBC MM proms issue THIS month is actually a DVD of Beethoven's 4th PC and Neilsen's 4th Symph. from preveious proms.

opilec wrote,


Well, why laugh, tell your musicologist he's not funny. The BBC MM circulation is currently over 45,000 ! Why are they not all posting on here? 

John W

For CD reviews, I find International Record Review to be on the highest level. But don't buy any of them on a regular basis. Read through most of the academic periodicals regularly, but they are all a bit mixed. And look at the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik more these days - again mixed, but overall on a higher level to whatever it's English-speaking equivalent might be (Classical Music? BBC Music Mag?). For new music, can't think of anything better than Musiktexte.

Are they all instructions?

I like International Record Review too but I rather like the little pictures of the CD covers that most other review magazines have.

Might that be something akin to a musical equivalent of the London Review of Books or New York Review of Books? That would be most welcome, I reckon.

Well, I've been pouring through lots of old issues of NZfM recently, ones from the 1980s and 1990s, in the context of researching various things, and there are countless articles of great interest (too many to photocopy!). Even when just looking at a year or two's issues (for example, a whole series of very intelligent articles on the postmodernism debate, by Hermann Danuser, Ulrich Dibelius, Mauricio Kagel and Konrad Boehmer - all within the space of a year). As far as Hespos is concerned, he hasn't been served that well by periodicals (or books) anywhere. Contact was OK but over-rated, I reckon - I have all the back issues from about half-way through its circulation, and there are only a handful of articles I'd go back to. EONTA was extremely good (though only had six issues ever), but that was in large measure because it provided translations of articles on music and the other arts that had previously appeared in German. That would account for over half of it. CD reviews aren't really the primary reason for reading a journal these days (reckon I can find better informed opinions on r.m.c.r. or the like, actually - or at least ones that will give me a real idea of what the CDs are like).

Re academic journals - I do find that claim about readership hard to imagine. Most university libraries get all of those, and I'm sure there are a few people in each who read them, or at least skim through them. Of course many such articles are simply very specialised and as such wouldn't be so easy to read by those who aren't very well-versed in that particular area. But the same could be said for articles on very specialised scientific subjects, and I doubt one could seriously argue they are less important as a result. Nineteenth-Century Music really isn't great at the moment, but there's plenty of extremely well-researched and original stuff in other publications.

I know next to nothing on French musicological journals - any you know and would recommend?

And the other the referee?

I seriously doubt this for music journals, given that often they are quite readable, even if one does not verify every statement.  Except for the bad ones, of course.